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ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoGenerative text AI generates text. How is this a revelation?
- spacecadet 3y agoIm working on honeypot data... the challenge continues.
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- seba_dos1 3y agoIn other words: a text generator has generated a text.
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- inglor_cz 3y agoTuring test passed, because that is what quite a lot of human scientists did. Hello, Dr. Ariely, you've met your match. Sarcasm aside, once such systems really learn to lie, they will be all too human-like. Perhaps the defining quality of real intelligence is deception.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoIts insane how they think they can have their AGI and eat it too! The closest thing we have to AGI is like a human child even though that's Synthetic (mankind made) General Intelligence and they can't really be truly relied upon and not learn or formulate sentences you don't like
- ctoth 3y agoNow all it needs to learn is which asses to kiss and it's well on it's way to a PhD!
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- simonw 3y ago"The authors asked GPT-4 ADA to create a data set concerning people with an eye condition called keratoconus" That had me confused for a moment, since there's no GPT-4 model called Ada (the current embeddings model is called that, and there was a GPT-3 LLM model with that name too). Then I realized they were using ADA as an acronym for Advanced Data Analysis.
- IanCal 3y agoFor anyone jumping in who hasn't read the article, this is not about hallucinations and some researchers being surprised that GPT-4 doesn't always respond with absolute truth. Instead it's about how easily it can be used to generate plausible looking datasets that would confirm a hypothesis. It's a warning note to journals about how fake data can more easily be created.
- jhbadger 3y agoExactly. It's no different from the fake data sets created by hand in scientific misconduct cases for years, just I guess easier. I guess that's not a good thing, but given even making a fake data set by hand is far easier than generating real data, I'm not sure if this will suddenly make more people fake data.
- Tostino 3y agoThe fake data that's been caught so far in just about every one of the cases that I've read about has been ridiculously poorly constructed fake data. I think the people that are good at faking data simply don't get caught.
- xbar 3y agoThe volume of bogus research is already growing non-linearly. It suggests that there is a market for fake datasets, which will lead to better AI training to fix this problem. Attacks only ever get better, not worse.
- krageon 3y agoHaving spent significant time implementing machine learning papers before the LLM age, I can promise you over 90% of papers you'll find are full of shit. The claims they make are true in only the most contrived of circumstances and don't hold up under any kind of scrutiny. How exactly they came to these lies (data lies, result lies, omitting lies) is really immaterial. The concept everyone is apparently struggling with is that producing a paper that is entirely lies is not doing the scientific world a disservice: It is not unusual and already happens at scale. Making it even easier might motivate someone to actually figure out a way to ensure papers are reproducible and not full of shit. In essence this is a good thing.
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- insanitybit 3y agoThis is not particularly surprising, nor is it really bad - generating data that appears valid is really powerful. Although it was a bit funny since I happen to have keratoconus, and I don't hear much about it often.
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- sigmar 3y ago>“It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments.” Perhaps I'm naive, but I think the people that want to fake data were already doing it without tools like chatgpt. Especially since a ton of biological data is normally distributed, so it's exceedingly easy to generate plausible fake results for such data without a system as advanced as chatgpt
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- abnry 3y agoExactly. How is this news? What would be surprising is if ChatGPT _could_ generate fake data that passed analysis.
- miohtama 3y ago[dead]
- marcuskaufmann 3y agoThis could be the key to gain ultimate understanding
- pjot 3y agoWorking in analytics long enough has shown me how often people will p-hack their data to support their desired outcome. I’ve met many “data driven” teams that quickly turn their nose up at bad data
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoRoughly speaking, the whole point of an LLM is to create plausible sounding text, without regard to the truth (which it cannot determine or derive), so it's a tool that is perfectly suited to this sort of malfeasance.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI’ve read this over and over, and believe it - but it’s so easy to forget when it absolutely nails something like debugging or suggesting a CMake edit or finding 5 letter combinations that are reversible with a vowel in the middle, or etc. It’s just still mind blowing I can get a sarcastic summary of an email in the theme of GlaDOS from Portal and in the same screen get an email proofread. It’s funny how far “what should the next word be” can go.
- lazystar 3y agoa billion humans typing on a billion keyboards for a few decades... just needed someone to come along and categorize each of the outputs.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI like that. And the numbers are way higher than a billion.
- strogonoff 3y agoIt might seem that there are cases where the ability to generate heaps of plausibly sounding text on demand is helpful, and there are cases where it is pretty much the worst possible capability to have.
- gardenhedge 3y agoIt's really worth watching this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38388669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38388669
- carlorolland56 3y ago
- sethbannon 3y agoThis is why for domains like science, tools like Elicit are so needed [1]. They've been doing some interesting work on factored cognition to avoid these sort of hallucinations [2]. 1: https://elicit.com/ https://elicit.com/ 2: https://blog.elicit.com/factored-verification-detecting-and-reducing-hallucinations-in-frontier-models-using-ai-supervision/ https://blog.elicit.com/factored-verification-detecting-and-...
- CodeWriter23 3y agoIt's just emulating a certain cross-section of human scientists.
- replwoacause 3y agoStill not good though. Only makes the behavior more prolific.
- nickpsecurity 3y agoIf Arxiv was used in training, some of those scientists were the ones that taught it to do this. Well, a good chunk of whatever they scraped off the Internet, too.
- elashri 3y agoIronically, I tried to ask ChatGPT to generate a signal + some plausibly background for a potential Supersymmetry particle discovery (with some details about model independent searches) and it started hallucinating like someone whose heart broken and spent the night drinking at the bar. I chose the wrong field to be able to fake data /S.
- peteradio 3y agoIf anyone ever tried to talk to me about supersymmetry again I'd probably react the same.
- stainablesteel 3y agoi'm more concerned about people who couldn't do this without chatgpt
- mmasu 3y agoIn this instance the ability to generate fake data is seen as negative, however in other realms it’s seen as a feature, rather than a bug. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_data or in scientific literature: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09191 https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09191 a few companies are doing exclusively this
- SrslyJosh 3y agoYes, there are situations where it's useful to generate plausible fake data, but those are the exception, not the rule.
- nickpsecurity 3y agoA long time ago, I ran into the books The Art of Deception and How to Lie With Statistics. They seemed like a good start on training people to spot deceptions. There were articles here on things like p-hacking. Then, the replication crisis. While no time now, I’m still interested in making a list of resources (esp free) that tells how to construct good studies, has comprehensive presentation of all categories of mistakes/lies we see in them, examples of each, and practice studies with known errors. Anyone here got good books or URL’s that could go in a resource like that? That could train new reviewers quickly? If I return to AI or ever work in it, I also planned to teach all of that to AI models to automatically review scientific papers. Might contribute to solving the replication crisis. Anyone who’s doing AI now feel free to jump on that. Get a startup or Ph.D. with a tool that tells us which of the rest are fake.
- yieldcrv 3y agoits sad that people write entire research papers about how they are prompting it wrong this stuff is getting old. it doesnt need studies on how an LLM bullshits. nobody needs a study on that, they need an article in a tabloid at best.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoAt least it wasn’t published in Nature. I was kind of scared when I saw the submitted link.
- peteradio 3y agoGENIUS!
- Nition 3y agoSomewhere in the mind's eye of science fiction is a world where we have near-unlimited productivity and knowledge and we're all free to pursue our self-actualized lives as we see fit. But as productivity increases, and as AI improves, in both cases individual greed holds back lifting up the many. And so we end up asking for caution on automating away someone's job, or caution on rapid AI progress. Does anyone know any good writing on how humanity might fight its way through all these mires of progress to the other side - that science fiction world that may or may not even be possible? How the world might look as these things continue to progress over time? Either fiction or a serious analysis is fine. Most sci-fi skips straight to "There is no more need for University, we simply ask the AI", missing the "students are using AI to cheat" phase entirely.
- hliyan 3y agoThe world of Star Trek is one where humanity learns from the devastation of world war three and over a century, creates a society where almost everything is run by computers, money doesn't exist, and people work primarily for their personal satisfaction. But I think true AGI is frowned upon there.
- smitty1e 3y ago"Humanity learns" is impossible. The unit of analysis is the individual. Some state may cross between individuals via education, but the individuals still must learn. History shows that knowledge transmission remains a sticky wicket.
- chongli 3y agoFirm disagree! Example: take a tour of the tower of London and learn about all the nasty medieval tortures we used to inflict on people. Now we don't do that anymore. Humans learn things collectively via culture and cultural transmission has been an extremely effective tool of knowledge preservation over the generations.
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- itissid 3y agoDataColada people already had a lot of work prior to this.
- Threeve303 3y agoIt is becoming more human every day
- colechristensen 3y agoI asked ChatGPT to come up with a list of references for a topic I was researching. Every single citation it came up with was hallucinated except for one which turned out to be extremely useful.
- bedhead 3y agoJust like people!
- thomastjeffery 3y agoI think it would be more clear to say, "ChatGPT assembled a fake data set as a continuation to scientific hypothesis". ChatGPT does not generate data. It reassembles the data (text) it was given, including the text in its training corpus.
- nvrmnd 3y agoI don't think that's accurate, it generates novel outputs that were not observed in the training data.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoIt doesn't generate new tokens. Train an LLM on text that only uses lowercase, and it will never output an uppercase letter.
- pixl97 3y agoBut can it put two tokens together 10 01 = 1001?
- nvrmnd 3y agoSo the model is limited to using words and characters that already exist. I agree with you but I don't see why is a limitation worth pointing out.
- dacryn 3y agoyou literally have to put in every number for it to do mathematics correctly... its as stupid as that. some try to get around it by indeed only having the 10 different digits and glue them together, but its a hallucination that that works. an important point in generalization is for example that you teach it something. This is literally important 'ycombinator is a website' is a prompt that is almost impossible of ycombinator is not in your training set
- hunter2_ 3y ago
- ChainOfFools 3y agoIt's only a matter of time until someone comes up with a GPT that takes whatever off-axis theories a research paper writer wishes to promulgate, and searches the entire corpus of academic literature for references that can be strung together in such a way as to support any argument one likes. A quack's dream come true, substantiating an argument by backsolving from its feeble or malevolent conclusion to a set of well-known premises but-with-citations. converting untenable speculation into something that passes many superficial tests of legitimacy, which is more than enough to boost it into broader and less critical visibility. "thick with citations, therefore truthy" is a big blind spot in the casual heuristic used ro gauge the quality of a given piece of research writing, especially at the undergrad level where this tool, lets call it CheatGPT, would be stupendously popular.
- m3m3tic 3y agoThis is already possible with search engines, there is enough information on the internet that you can substantiate just about any claim regardless of how much evidence there is to the contrary. (see flat-earth, plenty of plausible sounding claims with real, albeit, cherry picked evidence).
- ChainOfFools 3y agoYes of course, this is already possible with AI writing assistance as well, if you're willing to plug in some of the phrases they come up with into a search engine to figure out where they may have come from. But you still have to do the work of stringing the arguments together into a cohesive structure and figuring out how to find research that may be well outside the domains you're familiar with. But I'm talking about writing a thesis statement, "eating cat boogers makes you live 10 years longer for Science Reasons" and have it string together a completely passable and formally structured argument along with any necessary data to convince enough people to give your cat booger startup revenue to secure next round, because that seems to be where all these games are headed. The winner is the one who can outrun the truth by hashing together a lighter weight version of it, and though it won't stand up to a collision with real thing, you'll be very far from the explosion by the time it happens.
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- yallneedtoget 3y ago[dead]
- carbocation 3y agoAs an academic researcher, I find analysis of GPT-4 itself — as it pertains to other fields — to be essentially meaningless. There are no guarantees that the version of the model that was used will be available in the future (the API endpoints seem to have a ~12 month future-looking guarantee at most). Don't get me wrong: 1. GPT-4 is incredibly interesting 2. Studying GPT-4 is interesting for people working in that field But when I see people writing about how GPT-4 can pass the USMLE (etc), it has no lasting meaning. It might as well be marketing for OpenAI, and to me it has roughly that amount of academic importance.
- blackoil 3y agoIt shows current state and progress. No strong reason to believe future models will preform worse.
- carbocation 3y agoYes, and that's interesting both popularly and to people doing research in developing better models. But for people who are nominally using this to conduct scientific inquiries in other domains, the specific performance characteristics are what actually matter. When I am writing about the results of my semantic segmentation model, the characteristics of that specific model are more important than the notion that future models will be at least as good. Hence my critique being pretty narrow (the academic use of GPT-4 for downstream science).
- barnabyjones 3y agoThey're testing a consumer product. They're product testers.
- photochemsyn 3y agoIf you haven't read the breakdown of the epic Jan Hendrik Schön scandal in which he published about a half-dozen fraudulent papers in Science and Nature based on fabricated results regarding organic (chemically speaking) semiconductor devices cooked up out of thin air, start here. Required reading for any young graduate student IMO. The shame of Bell Labs, Science and Nature, all taken for a ride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Fantastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Fantastic If that fraudster had started out with ChatGPT4, the fraud might have persisted for another decade (because organic semiconductors don't seem to have the capabilities he believed they had), because he was only detected via replicated datasets. If he'd had ChatGPT4 to generate new plausible datasets, well...? I guarantee you that a significant fraction of the people in academia who 'got there first' on significant discoveries in science did so by fabricating data along the lines of Schön. They just guessed right, and fabricated data, and then more serious careful scientists were able to replicate their bogus work later. Schön guessed wrong, and every effort to replicate his work failed, and Bell Labs, Science and Nature were left with egg on their face, which they're still trying to wipe off. ChatGPT4 and its shady parents and affiliates will only make this problem worse, not better. "Benefit to humanity" my ass. [edit: if you wonder why I sound so salty I read all those Schön papers with interest and fascination when I was a young graduate student myself, now I'm older and seriously jaded.]
- vikramkr 3y agoIt's awesome to know that the scientific process that's been in use for centuries, based on peer review and the importance of replication, is still so powerful that AI generated fake data can't do anything to undermine it. Reality doesn't care how the data was faked when you replicate an experiment! Now, if only scientists and institutions would actually bother using those tools we developed centuries ago. Unfortunately if they don't - you don't exactly need chatgpt to fake data you know? Replication crisis etc etc. Long story short: Man is it awesome that the scientific method is resilient to this! Too bad nobody uses it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoI’d be interested in seeing how AI can help replicate. Apparently, we have a replication crisis. From what I hear, many papers can’t be replicated, and we don’t know, because no one tries.
- vikramkr 3y agoIronically one of the major papers that showed that many findings couldn't be replicated couldn't be replicated. Academia is packed to the brim with perverse incentives. It's amazing that scientists are creative and capable enough to keep consistently changing the world and gaining deep, extraordinary, and replicable insights into our universe in a broken system. It would be nice if they didn't need to fight the system though, see the story of the mRNA vaccine nobel and how hard she had to fight against the establishment to do the research that would end up saving a truly staggering number of lives
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- Obscurity4340 3y agoConfabulation, folks
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- renewiltord 3y agoPeople will find such dumb reasons to get outraged. Folks have been photoshopping GFP expression for years. Then some halfwit will post it "there's some evidence that X is Y". Try to replicate it, you can't. Because the science is fake.
- dukeofdoom 3y agoSeems like lying gets a bar wrap... All kinds of great things came to be because of lying about the potential benefits, monorails included. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6G https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6G
- timcavel 3y ago[dead]
- hackan 3y ago"Unbiased" > personalised for you XD The joke writes itself.
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- swayvil 3y agoIf the criteria for truth is a convincing argument, and we have a machine for generating convincing arguments to fit anything, and analyzing the argument is too much trouble, then what?
- Aloha 3y agoHow long til I can produce a paper that says smoking is good for you, and will extend life or increase quality of life? ;-)
- lakpan 3y agoSmokers are more likely to be social, so they have a better quality of life. Done. As for extending life… social creatures live more? therefore smoking extends life.
- SrslyJosh 3y agoHow fast can you sign up for an OpenAI account?
- gumballindie 3y agoThere are plenty such papers out there - now obviously disproven. At some point smoking was prescribed as a cure or various heaelty issues. Letting you know so you don't feel impressed by what was "created" when a chat bot generates such a paper.
- voitvodder 3y ago[dead]
- anigbrowl 3y agoAnd people say LLMs can't think like a human. (this is a joke; not all humans are able to analyze humor as well as an LLM)
- voganmother42 3y ago"Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion." From the thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
- cosmojg 3y agoThe paper[1] itself reads like marketing material that was itself written by GPT-4. Why was this published? And why is Nature reporting on it? As someone who generates fake/simulated datasets for a living, the scientific value of this paper is totally lost on me. [1] https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2023.5162 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2023.5162
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- mcqueenjordan 3y agoThis is some next-level human behavior prediction.
- sebow 3y agoThe framing makes it sound like it's a "bug" or something. From my understanding it's not, because it's hardly a reliable reasoning tool: whether using statements or using data. Unless we come up with or advance a better architecture, similar "panic porn" is useless, not to mention this reeks of a hit piece. Just verify everything and stop with the blind trust.
- golergka 3y ago> The authors asked GPT-4 ADA to create a data set > The authors instructed the large language model to fabricate data What did they think would happen, exactly?